The present invention relates to a pistol which comprises a housing composed of plastic, a barrel slide (which contains a barrel and a breech and is guided in the longitudinal direction with respect to the housing) and a trigger mechanism. Pistols of widely differing systems are thus affected.
With the aim of making pistols as light as possible, efforts are being made to make as many parts as possible from plastic. Owing to the high forces which occur, this is subject to limits, although these are receding owing to the progress in plastics technology. Certain parts of the housing, such as the guides for the barrel slide, still have to be composed of metal. Thus, although it has become possible to design a housing composed of plastic, certain parts (such as the guides for the barrel slide) still have to be composed of metal. In some cases, these have been connected non-detachably to the housing by means of extrusion coating, and in some cases they are inserted individually into the housing.
Such a pistol is known in practice, the GLOCK Model 17. In this pistol, the barrel slide guides are individual extrusion-coated parts. The manufacture of such plastic parts is expensive and complicated, while the metal parts must be inserted into the injection molding die accurately in position and corrected for shrinkage. The mountings for the parts of the trigger mechanism and the control parts for locking the barrel are individually inserted as assemblies into the housing, resulting in further dimensional inaccuracies with respect to one another and with respect to the barrel slide guides. If individual extrusion-coated parts become worn or damaged, the entire housing must be replaced. A further disadvantage is that the individual parts are difficult to fit into the housing, since accessibility to the interior of the housing is poor. This disadvantage occurs irrespective of the choice of material.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a pistol construction which allows for the use of plastics technology to a large extent, and which provides high precision and simple assembly.